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Olin Library

LibQual 2016 User Comments and Responses

Here are the responses from Jonathan, the Library Director, to all of the comments received on the 2016 LibQual survey. Where necessary, individual names and identifying information have been removed, but where the comments are favorable I have left names in. The comments have been grouped into major themes. Frequently your comments touched on more than one topic, in which case a single comment may be extracted from a longer comment.

Service - Negative

Service - Positive

The Bookmark Cafe

The Collection

The Building & Space

Group and Individual Study Spaces

Hours

Noise

Printing

Systems

Interlibrary Loan (ILL)

Smoking


Service – Negative

  • XX department is inept and laughably incompetent (XX, the others are just generally slow).

Jonathan's Response: As is our practice, I have made this comment anonymous. It concerns a department that is not part of the library, but I have passed it on to the appropriate administrator. I encourage the author to contact that person directly and give them details of the poor service you have received. I know they are always interested in correcting problems and improving service.


Service – Positive

  • The people who work at the library are extremely knowledgeable and helpful.  The biggest problem is with the lack of books the library has on topics that i am interested in.
  • The library is a wonderful environment with helpful workers and plenty of resources  
    I feel so at home here. :)
  • I'm comfortable and satisfied whenever I visit the library.
  • The Olin Library is a terrific resource. I have used libraries at other colleges and universities and Rollins beats them all for service, ease of use, and staff knowledge and helpfulness. It is a treasure.
  • My satisfaction with the Library is VERY high.
  • Thank you for always taking such good care of all of us - students and faculty both are extremely lucky to have such wonderful resources and (even better) such an amazing staff!!
  • I have not done any research at the library because that is not part of my job. However, when I have had questions about copyright or access to resources, library staff have been very helpful.
  • Thank you so much for all of your support and efforts to stay so responsive and helpful!!
  • Kudos to Susan Montgomery - a real team member and great asset.
  • I love that we can eat and drink there, since most of us have so little time. Thank you the service is great.
  • Great work staff!
  • The library at Rollins goes above and beyond for the Rollins community. I love that the library staff is willing to help Rollins students with anything that they need when it comes to research, printing, and tutoring.
  • Great job!! I love the Library!!
  • Great customer service.
  • It's great! I'm very happy with it, just keep it up.
  • You guys do an excellent job!
  • Olin excels in all aspects of being a efficiently run library. I have no quarrels with the way the library is set up or run.
  • Olin is amazing.  Period.
  • Overall I am very satisfied with the library.
  • Please keep doing what you're doing, great job!
  • Great job! Very helpful.
  • I live off campus this year so it’s hard for me to get to the library, but last semester I spent several days a week there.

Jonathan's Response: Seriously, thanks for the complements.


Bookmark Cafe

  • I wish the cafe was open 24/7.
  • The cafe to be open on Friday days
  • I like that the cafe is open late at night because the C-Store isn't.
  • The cafe employees are really nice!
  • The bookmark cafe is a Godsend

Jonathan's Response: Not surprisingly, the Café and Sodexho staff are popular. So popular you want more hours. We agree. Starting in January the Café is opening for longer hours, especially breakfast hours starting at 7 a.m. So come on down!


The Collection

  • Overall, the Library is FANTASTIC. Most of my needs are for digital/electronic copies of material, and I can find the vast majority of the material I need.
  • I really appreciate all of the availability and upkeep at the library. It's a wonderful location to get work done!
  • I really enjoy the library and all the resources that there are. It is always a good environment to study or relax.
  • I would like more resources for journal articles especially in music. If also like to see schedule for rooms, so I know if and when there will be classes in that room
    Make chargers for Android available for loan!
  • I really love the lynda.com resource this semester.  I've been using it extensively in my course: making custom playlists rather than readings for my students to watch before class.  The students love it compared to traditional readings from the textbooks.
  • I would also appreciate if the library had a larger section on contemporary philosophy of religion or Christian Theology.
  • The library has many very helpful resources! No big complaints.
  • It takes months to order the books for the library.

Jonathan's Response: Actually, the average turnaround time on books is about 22 days, hardly months, but we are constantly looking for ways to reduce that time while efficiently using the library budget. I am glad to hear that others appreciate our collections and want more. I have good news. We expect to add even more access to online journals (including some in music.) I am also glad to hear Lynda.com is a hit. If you haven’t found this great online training resource yet, take a look at our website. By the way, we do have chargers for mobile devices scattered around the library, and we also have four Android chargers for check out at the desk.


The Building and Space

  • I really love the space and that the librarians come to our class. The website, though, can be a little confusing!
  • I like how quiet the quiet floors are and the different seating arrangements. I can sit at a single desk, a large desk with friends, in a room, in the pillow room, on a long sofa, or a single-seater couch. It's peaceful and clean. I also like the cafe and the printers because they are easy to use.
  • Create a more hands on environment, open for creation and invention. Start to focus more on a third space, a place where attracts people even with materials and the technology available at home. A place where people come to relax, have a quiet time, have a studio space for creativity and work in groups.
  • I love the study space at the Olin Library. I live in Orlando and drive out of my way to come study here several days a week even when I don't have class. 100% worth it.
    I am very pleased with the service the library has to offer.  I especially love sitting outdoors on the rocking chairs to read a book!
  • Over all the library is one of my favorite place in Rollins.

Jonathan's Response: Wow. Thanks for all the high praise. I'm impressed at least one person is aware of Ray Oldenburg’s work on the third place. We have been explicitly implementing his model for almost a decade now. To learn more, see Montgomery, Susan and Miller, Jonathan. “The Third Place: the library as collaborative and community space in a time of fiscal restraint.” College & Undergraduate Libraries. 18(2-3) Summer 2011: 228-38. Your idea of taking this in a creative/maker space direction is interesting. We aim to create varied spaces that work for all students at different times.


Group and Individual Study Spaces

  • Love the basement study room. This survey was questioned oddly
  • I wish there were more group study rooms on quiet floors.
  • If the larger classrooms had way to set priority for those whose have larger groups.
  • I know you can sign up but sometimes you never know what time will work the best for everyone’s schedules.
  • More individual study areas would be nice. Employees are always helpful.
  • More individualized spaces for lone studying - longer hours for upstairs and downstairs

Jonathan's Response: I am glad to say that we are opening even more group study rooms – three on the 3rd floor. Classrooms are schedule by Student Records according to enrollment size and the specific needs of the teaching faculty. We are happy to host them, but we do not have any control over that scheduling process. We continue to try and balance the need for group and individual study spaces. Expect to see more and different mixes of such spaces in the year ahead.


Hours

  • I'm fully appreciative of the 24/7 open floor, however this floor does not have a designated quiet space. Adding a 24/7 accessible quiet area or an area that becomes quiet during non-regular hours would be appreciated more than words could allow me to communicate.
  • Service is excellent, I'm glad the library is open 24 hours
  • I wish the other floors besides the second floor remained open after hours. But I appreciate how students can access the main floor's facilities at all times. It is really convenient for studying late.
  • Being an off-campus student, extended library hours would be beneficial in getting work done with a crazy schedule, especially in the evenings.
  • Other floors besides main floor should be open after 12 a.m.
  • I also wish the upper floors did not close at 5pm, but rather stay opened later.
  • Need more access hours to the 1st, 3rd, and 4th floors for research purposes on weekends and week nights.

Jonathan's Response: If we open the whole library 24/7 we would need to staff it and that is expensive. The money would have to come from something else – collections, staff, etc. – that you also find useful. The level of use of the main 24/7 floor does not warrant opening the other three floors. However, I do want to point out the Library Meeting Room on the main floor is designated as a silent study space after hours. This should be a less distracting space than the more popular tables in the open area.


Noise

  • The library has a comfortable atmosphere and is quiet enough to for students to study and concentrate.
  • Sometime people can be loud in the tower room, which can get very distracting.

Jonathan's Response: Third and fourth floors (including the Tower Room) are designated as quiet space. We ask you to self-police this and if necessary ask people who are making too much noise to move elsewhere, but if that doesn’t work, or makes you uncomfortable, just as a staff person (by phone or chat) we will be happy to deal with the situation.


Printing

  • I wish it was easier to print in color, I still have no idea how to.

Jonathan's Response: We feel your pain. From a desktop computer in the library, make sure you adjust the printing options on the program you are printing from to allow color. Send the job to the print queue and swipe your R-Card on the designated color printer. If you have any problems, we are happy to help.


Systems

  • The service and care you all provide is wonderful! Systems and electronics can be outdated, when I look up journal articles we often don't have access to them.
  • I am a huge fan of the library services; it would be helpful if the resource search function was a little more user-friendly, though.
  • Very good source. Google scholar easier to sort articles, save, export as a batch to endnote the references and then download from Olin. I suggest try to team with google scholar or upgrade this function in the website. The many sources needed in the EDBA program require agility and productivity and this described process helped me a lot --> Google scholar research, save --> export references as a selected batch. When I access google scholar from Rollins, it identifies the source is available at Olin automatically.
  • Some search filters are lacking on the library search page (for example: only DVDs). This is just one thing I ran into recently.
  • A lot to the resources which the library has are obscure to most of the school so we cannot tap into them and even if we know they exist it's hard to navigate them independently
  • The online resources and search engines are difficult to maneuver, although I have had the class with Susan in my first year, it is still a difficult site to get around and find sources.

Jonathan's Response: I hear you. Whatever the big commercial players in the information industry might try to tell you, the ‘human information interface’ is not simple. Especially when you are engaged in scholarly research, you are entering a complex information eco-system that involves multiple sources, multiple platforms, issue of authority, credibility, and the stakes can be high. It is not like choosing a hot new coffee shop. That being said, we are always looking to remove barriers between you and the information you seek. One example of the comment above about Google Scholar. The reason you can find the full text of articles retrieved in Google Scholar is because library staff have developed the infrastructure that enables those links. It should be pretty seamless to you, but trust me, a lot of work goes into making it so.


Interlibrary Loan

  • I would die without ILL.
  • Interlibrary loan doesn't allow me to keep books for a useful length of time.

Jonathan's Response: Oh stop now. Interlibrary loan is good, but not life-saving. I am afraid the loan periods are set by the lending library, not by us. Like all libraries, they are trying to balance the needs of current and future users. If you need a book for longer, just ask, we will be happy to try and renew it for you.


Smoking


Jonathan's Response: I’m kidding. There were no comments about smoking outside the library. I think that might be a first. It seems the College’s policy may be having some impact.


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